Ken's Webloghttp://orange-road.com/blog
People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.Tue, 07 Aug 2018 18:06:35 +0000en-UShourly1Purging unapproved opinionshttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/08/07/purging-unapproved-opinions/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/08/07/purging-unapproved-opinions/#commentsTue, 07 Aug 2018 18:06:35 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5998Major Internet Platforms Ban Alex Jones. Jones is a noted conspiracy theorist and the founder of the InfoWars website and podcast. In a Monday tweet, he confirmed that Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple had completely unpublished and/or removed his professional pages and podcasts. [Reason.com]

It’s been well known for a while that those organizations hate anyone who’s not a liberal, and have a long history of censoring opposing viewpoints. It’s unusual for a bunch of them to get together for a coordinated purge like this, though. The most likely reason I’ve seen for it is that there’s a midterm election coming up, and the liberals are afraid of the very large Infowars audience being exposed to unapproved thoughts. For those who want to see what the Thought Police don’t want you to know, see the Infowars channel on BitChute.

A few hours after U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik, a Clinton appointee, muzzled Defense Distributed with a court order Tuesday evening, the CodeIsFreeSpeech.com mirror site appeared. It’s a project of the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and other civil rights groups, and includes freely downloadable computer-aided design (CAD) files for the AR-15, AR-10, Ruger 10-22, Beretta 92FS, and other firearms. [Reason.com]

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/08/04/you-cant-stop-the-signal/feed/0A rare acknowledgement of realityhttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/07/14/a-rare-acknowledgement-of-reality/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/07/14/a-rare-acknowledgement-of-reality/#respondSun, 15 Jul 2018 03:37:13 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5987Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent. Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill. They are suitably astonished, and often annoyed. But I point out that even a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him. [The Atlantic]

The law professor being quoted was talking specifically about lawyers, but this is something that everyone should keep in mind when advocating for new laws, but unfortunately the sort of people who do advocate for new laws never do.

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/07/14/a-rare-acknowledgement-of-reality/feed/0Current Immigration Laws Are Unconstitutionalhttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/07/10/current-immigration-laws-are-unconstitutional/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/07/10/current-immigration-laws-are-unconstitutional/#respondTue, 10 Jul 2018 17:47:55 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5984Does the Federal Government Have the Power to Regulate Immigration? Thomas Jefferson and James Madison Said No. Yet federal regulation of immigration is a power both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison maintained was “no where delegated to the federal government.” And since no amendment has granted that power since they made that argument in 1798, it is exercised by the federal government without the consent of the governed, legitimized only by the same kind of “activist Court” conservatives condemn when it sanctions federal power they don’t like. [Foundation for Economic Education]

This is something I’ve been pointing out for years, so I’m pleased to see that someone else as noticed it. Sadly, it doesn’t really matter in practice since the government doesn’t care at all about the Constitution.

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/07/10/current-immigration-laws-are-unconstitutional/feed/0A look at cultural differenceshttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/06/24/a-look-at-cultural-differences/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/06/24/a-look-at-cultural-differences/#respondMon, 25 Jun 2018 00:24:29 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5980Honor, Dignity, Victim: A Tale of Three Moral Cultures. Honor cultures emerge when a centralized state authority is not present or not legitimate and when people are extremely materially vulnerable. Under these conditions, people will take offense very easily, grow quickly fearful, and engage in higher rates of defensive, pre-emptive aggression as well as vigilante justice in order to settle their disputes.

[…]

In a dignity culture, people in this more modern form of society may resort to legal authority when disputes and wrongdoings are sufficiently severe, but otherwise they will make efforts to privately resolve disputes in a non-violent manner. In such a society, all citizens are assumed to have a sense of dignity and self-restraint, and everyone is expected to, at least at first, give the benefit of the doubt to a disputant to see if a conflict can be resolved peacefully.

[…]

Victim cultures share in common with honor cultures the sensitivity to slights or insults, but whereas those in an honor culture might try to retaliate (physically or otherwise), people in a victim culture will instead appeal to a powerful, omnipresent state/legal authority. Classic examples are Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia. In contrast to honor cultures that expect victims to be strong and stern enough to defend themselves, and dignity cultures that expect victims to be calm and charitable when in a dispute or disagreement, victim cultures emphasize how complainants are emotionally or physically fragile, vulnerable, and weak. [Skeptic]

A good explanation of the underlying cause of the current “culture war,” where most of the country is still a dignity culture but various high-profile areas (the media, academia) are a victim culture.

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/06/24/a-look-at-cultural-differences/feed/0The reality of land ownershiphttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/05/10/the-reality-of-land-ownership/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/05/10/the-reality-of-land-ownership/#respondThu, 10 May 2018 18:40:45 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5973A simplified taxless state (part 1 of 3). Thus, we can talk of tier-one and tier-two land owners, where tier-one owners are those land owners capable of defending their territory against state-level aggression (or capable of performing state-level aggression), and tier-two land owners are those who are somehow at the mercy of the tier-one owners retaining ownership of the land the tier-two owners think they own, but actually don’t when push comes to shove.

In cleartext, a state-level actor is the only type of actor capable of owning land. Within a state, there is arbitration for when tier-two “owners” are in dispute over a piece of territory. But between states, there is no international arbitration of land ownership – brutal aggression decides who owns what (whether one approves of that fact or not). When tier-two “owners” are in dispute, it is not much different from when two children are fighting over who gets to use family property: at the end of the day, it’s still the adults’ property. [Falkvinge On Liberty]

The proposal is just a pipe dream, but it’s noteworthy for being based on the fact that private ownership of land is a lie. This is something I noticed years ago, but almost nobody else has.

Beginning in July, Google will no longer accept advertisements from private bail bond services. David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy, explained the decision Monday: “We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products…”

[…]

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, put out a statement Monday afternoon supporting Google’s decision: “No one should be incarcerated—before they’ve even been tried or convicted of a crime—simply because they can’t afford not to be.” [Hit & Run]

So in order to help poor people who have trouble affording bail, they’re trying to make it harder for poor people to afford bail. It’s amazing how consistently rich liberals respond to problems affecting poor people by doing things that make those problems worse.

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/05/10/google-doesnt-understand-bail-reform/feed/0Another reason to like Uberhttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/05/06/another-reason-to-like-uber/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/05/06/another-reason-to-like-uber/#respondSun, 06 May 2018 20:37:55 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5968What Do You Call a Tool to Help Uber Avoid Gov’t Stings? A Good Start. Uber uses a tool called “Greyball” to circumvent officials. It’s a tool that Uber says is designed to help it deny ride requests to people who violate their terms of service, disrupt the system, or threaten their drivers. They also have been using it to operate in places where government officials have been trying to shut them down.

[…]

Uber used this tool to operate in Portland, Oregon, as regulators attempted to use sting operations to catch them and shut them down. As the story explains, this all bothered authorities because Uber was employing people and putting them to work outside of their purview… [Hit & Run]

This is pretty old news now, but it’s another reason to prefer Uber over other ride sharing services: they were willing to do something to protect their drivers from corrupt and oppressive local governments who were paid off by the taxi cartels to attack them.

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/05/06/another-reason-to-like-uber/feed/0Questionable marketing decisionhttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/04/21/questionable-marketing-decision/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/04/21/questionable-marketing-decision/#respondSun, 22 Apr 2018 01:18:45 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5965Lyft Announces It Will Make All Rides Carbon Neutral. Lyft announced it will spend millions of dollars to make all its rides carbon neutral.

[…]

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company announced Thursday that it will pay for a range of environmentally beneficial projects to compensate for the emissions from the millions of car journeys it provides every week. The tactic, known as carbon offsets, is a way for Lyft to do something about climate change without changing its business model. [Slashdot]

So Lyft is gambling that there are more prospective customers among religious fanatics who actually care that the company they get a ride from is buying indulgences than there are among sane people who don’t want to pay extra for a ride to pay for someone else’s religious beliefs. I’ll bet this makes Uber executives very happy.

]]>http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/04/21/questionable-marketing-decision/feed/0Video of the Dayhttp://orange-road.com/blog/2018/04/10/video-of-the-day/
http://orange-road.com/blog/2018/04/10/video-of-the-day/#respondTue, 10 Apr 2018 15:16:08 +0000http://orange-road.com/blog/?p=5960Thanks to Joel Simon, I found this hilarious video about the liberal love of tolerance and diversity: